Uh, duh. It could have been a different strain of the bubonic plague. It could have included a bunch of different diseases that were lumped in with bubonic plague. I hope these folks have got an infectious disease specialist or two on their team.

"You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays, we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach." --Theodoric of York

Once people are infected, they infect other people very rapidly. So all the stuff about barriers to rats would only apply to the earliest stage of the plague. When it hit heavily populated areas, it became a person-to-person disease.

Whatever it was, it sure killed a lot of people and actually resulted in a significant reduction in the supply of able-bodied workers. The surviving peasants shamelessly exploited that dislocation by demanding and receiving a totally unjustifiable improvement in their standard of living at the direct expense of their employers.

I am a little curious what they think could be the Black Death, if it wasn't bubonic plague.

I've got a book called "Diseases and History", a very interesting read, that suggests that the Black Death was actually two diseases working at once: the Bubonic plague, which is spread by rats, and Pneumonic Plague, which is spread by airborne droplets and was highly,highly contagious, which would correspond to the theory in this article, that "the researchers believe that the Black Death was transmitted through person-to-person contact, as are measles and smallpox.

The book I own is fairly old, so I don't know why the researchers in the article do not address Pneumonic Plague at all.

I didn't know that the bubonic plague could be spread person to person? I thought fleas were the vector? And that a flea had to bite an infected person, then bite another victim in order to spread the disease?

Modern bubonic plague typically needs to reach a high frequency in the rat population before it spills over into the human community via the flea vector.

Here in the US bubonic plague is endemic in the West due to prairie dog populations and their flea vectors. Don't these so-called scientists have anything better to do with our tax dollars than to spend their time trying to debunk accepted science.

Actually, both bubonic and pneumonic are the same organism, y. pestis. In the case of pneumonic, the patient has bubonic and some respiratory disease simultaneously, causing the cough droplets to be infected with y. pestis as well. The deadliest and most scary form of the disease is actually septicaemic plague. In that form, it infects the blood stream and few or no 'buboes' form. This was the form it took in patients who went to sleep healthy and never woke up.

Evolution of Infectious Disease, by Paul Ewald; and The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett. Garrett has another book out on public health issues that I haven't read, but it's supposed to be very informative.

Also, it's important to remember that a disease acts differently when it's first introduced to a population (hence the extremely high mortality among American Indians exposed to European diseases)and the symptoms are often different.

Also, it's important to remember that a disease acts differently when it's first introduced to a population (hence the extremely high mortality among American Indians exposed to European diseases)and the symptoms are often differenthence the extremely high mortality among American Indians exposed to European diseases

Thank you. It's interesting that the pla gene they sequenced for shows a point mutation from what's available in genbank today. It's also a fairly significant (size and hydrophobicitywise) mutation, phenylalanine to serine. Phenylalanine is fairly large and has a big non polar aromatic group. Serine is small and polar. No idea what this might do w. regard to the virulence aspect, but there are undoubtedly other differences in other genes they didn't sequence for. It would be interesting for them to sequence the whole genome of this particular bug and compare it to 'modern' y. pestis. I have read several theories that maintain that y. pestis mutated itself into 'not as virulent' somewhere along the end of the 1600's. Interesting to see if this is true. Modern plague sequencing and information can be found at....

I was recently taking Zithromax (antibiotic), and I went to a website describing how bacteria can become immune to this antibiotic. Apparently, in E.Coli (I think), one small genetic change renders the bacteria immune to Zithromax.

I was also told to eat lots of yogurt to replenish the bacteria in my colon. lol

Those are some fast moving rats. What is the land speed velocity of an African rat?

Landspeed? Then you rule out the aid of African swallows. With that speed, one would suspect Acme roller skates. :)

Speaking of the effects of newly introduced diseases, here's an interesting read: Spanish Conquest. Excerpt: Unknown to the Aztecs the Spanish had an invisible advantage. Apparently, one Spaniard soldiers was infected with the smallpox virus. Within two weeks the disease infected the Aztec Empire and one forth of the population died.

Don't these so-called scientists have anything better to do with our tax dollars than to spend their time trying to debunk accepted science.

That's what scientific inquiry is all about...

It was once scientifically accepted that proteins contained the genetic material of heredity, and that DNA was likely just a solvent or something. It wasnt until Watson and Crick in the '50's determined with x-ray crystallography the structure of DNA (the AGCT bases) that DNA could indeed transmit and record a lot of data.

Science is about examining what you "know," and finding out what you only thought you knew.

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